Thursday, July 23, 2015

Although it seems that System V IPC is obsolete thing, it's still used by many (enterprise) tools like databases, application servers etc.
The classic tool ipcs(1) provides basic overview, unfortunately the output is very fixed and it's impossible to mix the output columns (for example --pid and --creator cannot be used together etc.). It's also very difficult to extend the current implementation without break backward compatibility.
The solution is a new libsmartcols based tool: lsipc(1). It's like many another util-linux ls-like tools, columns are maintains independently, it's easy to extend, user has absolute control on the output and it provides more output formats (including JSON).
The important and unique is the default (--global) output: